


that one day the silence would break

by Farrowe



Category: Elisabeth - Levay/Kunze
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, One Word Prompt Meme, Silence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1905333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farrowe/pseuds/Farrowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is an old poison, and it is cultivated in the bones of the Hofburg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that one day the silence would break

**Author's Note:**

> for a drabble prompt meme, "belladonna," associated with silence.

Silence suits death. He wears it like an old cloak, or well-worn shoes, creeping through the hush that lies over the palace at night, or treading in the spaces between words that cut the air clean in two. He nestles sometimes in the echoes behind footsteps or in the ghosts of words, half-spoken before new sounds unfold from their fleshy packages and smother them.

He is there, too, embracing the echoes of the Crown Prince’s voice in the dark, and enveloping the scratch of his pen to the rhythm of words whose name will for ever be a shadow. He has often watched him swallow his tongue, red and swollen with thoughts that never reach his mother; they are filed neatly away behind the mirrors in his eyes, and he does not speak. Mirrors, after all, are mute.

Mirrors are fragile.

And mirrors break. Dust is gathering in the ancient cracks in the Crown Prince, and wedging them apart, and with each feathery touch of his hand death feels how the fragments sting and bleed. But he does not cry: silence embraced the crown prince when he was very young.

And death is quiet as he embraces him, too.


End file.
